Portability. If you are unemployed, or lose or change jobs, your health coverage stays with you.

Uniform Benefits. No Cadillac plans for the wealthy and Pinto plans for everyone else, with high deductibles, limited services, caps on payments for care, and no protection in the event of a catastrophe. One level of comprehensive care for everyone, regardless of the size of your wallet.

Prevention. By removing financial roadblocks, a universal health system encourages preventive care that lowers an individual’s ultimate cost and pain and suffering when problems are neglected and societal cost in the over-utilization of emergency rooms or the spread of communicable diseases.

Choice. Most private insurance restricts your choice of providers and hospitals. Under the U.S. National Health Insurance Act, patients have a choice, and the provider is assured a fair payment.

No Interference with Care. Caregivers and patients regain their autonomy to decide what’s best for a patient’s health, not what’s dictated by the billing department. No denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions or cancellation of policies for “unreported” minor health problems.

Reducing Waste. One third of every private health insurance dollar goes for paperwork and profits, compared to about 3% under Medicare, the federal government’s universal system for senior citizen healthcare.

Cost Savings. A guaranteed health care system can produce the cost savings needed to cover everyone, largely by using existing resources without the waste. Taiwan, shifting from a U.S. private health care model, adopted a similar system in 1995, boosting health coverage from 57% to 97% with little increase in overall health care spending.

Common Sense Budgeting. The public system sets fair reimbursements applied equally to all providers, private and public, while assuring that appropriate health care is delivered, and uses its
clout to negotiate volume discounts for prescription drugs and medical equipment.

Public Oversight. The public sets the policies and administers the system, not high priced CEOs meeting in private and making decisions based on their company’s stock performance needs.

Call Congress, and the President
Congressional switchboard: 202-224-3121
(ask for your representative’s office)

If your member is a current co-sponsor, thank your rep. and ask him or her to stand firm for HR 676 and actively seek additional co-sponsors.

If your member has yet to co-sponsor HR 676, ask him or her to please become a co-sponsor, select one or two talking points here.

Urge your member to accept testimony from panelists to explore the serious flaws in the Massachusetts health plan and examine why it cannot serve as a national model for providing universal and comprehensive care.

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You take away politics, take away whether you think trickle-down [economics] works, take away even what you think about race. Just look at this community. Are the families healthy and thriving? No? Okay. It's not resilient.

The agency's assessment of fracking fluid disclosure is part of its broader study on fracking and water—and spotlights the project's limitations.By Neela Banerjee Oil and gas companies refuse to disclose 10 percent of the hundreds of chemicals they use during hydraulic fracturing, according to a new analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency. […]

Two scientists from Columbia University launch a $40,000 pilot testing project in Pennsylvania they hope will lead to full-scale research.By David Hasemyer Frank Varano knows what's coming. His land near Williamsport, Pa., abuts property that has been leased for gas exploration––and he's certain it will be fracked. What is less certain is how that […]

If a new rule takes effect, about 95 percent of all pipelines would be subject to stricter safety testing because of their age, location and other factors.By Elizabeth Douglass It's been two years since a broken 1940s ExxonMobil pipeline flooded an Arkansas neighborhood with Canada's heaviest oil, and the ripple effects of the spill have made it to […]

(Reuters)The United States will submit plans for slowing global warming to the United Nations early this week but most governments will miss an informal March 31 deadline, complicating work on a global climate deal due in December. The U.S. submission, on Monday or Tuesday according to a White House official, adds to national strategies beyond 2020 already p […]

On March 2, motivational speaker Bob Lenz gave a presentation at Iron Mountain High School in Michigan... which might have been okay until he used the opportunity to promote an event he was hosting at a local church later that evening. This is the flyer he gave to students:And how did that evening event go? Well, he boasted about his conversions-to-Jesus aft […]

Gordon Klingenschmitt, the fundamentalist Christian and Colorado lawmaker, is finally getting a sort of punishment following his comments last week that the brutal attack of a pregnant woman occurred because we allow legal abortions in this country.He has now been pulled from one of the two committees on which he served:

How many religious references do we need to see from public school officials before we can all admit they've overstepped their bounds?Exhibit 1: Principal Albert Hardison's message on the website for Walnut Hill Elementary/Middle School in Louisiana, part of the Caddo Parish Public Schools:

Small is beautiful, when small is skilled and dedicated. ~Gene Logsdon→

I've observed that people tend to live at one of two extremes in the spectrum of life: those who live on the edge, and those who avoid the edge. Those who live on the edge are hanging out in the most dangerous and unstable places — yet they're also often the most powerful agents of change, because the edge is where change is happening; away from the edge, things are naturally unchanging. ~Thom Hartmann

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume. ~Noam Chomsky

Transition Tools (Basic)

Stoics/Freethought

Local Organic Family Farms

THE SMALL ORGANIC FARM greatly discomforts the corporate/ industrial mind because the small organic farm is one of the most relentlessly subversive forces on the planet. Over centuries both the communist and the capitalist systems have tried to destroy small farms because small farmers are a threat to the consolidation of absolute power.

Thomas Jefferson said he didn’t think we could have democracy unless at least 20% of the population was self-supporting on small farms so they were independent enough to be able to tell an oppressive government to stuff it.

It is very difficult to control people who can create products without purchasing inputs from the system, who can market their products directly thus avoiding the involvement of mercenary middlemen, who can butcher animals and preserve foods without reliance on industrial conglomerates, and who can’t be bullied because they can feed their own faces. ~Eliot Coleman